October 9, 2011

Yoga Local NYC has curated this Sunday morning outdoor yoga series for the BMW Guggenheim Lab. Please join us for challenging and inspiring classes from a selection of local yoga studios. The heart of yoga is both physical and mental: residing in the dynamic, living tension created by challenging one’s self to grow while accepting our human limitations. Yoga practice can be seen as the embodiment of the BMW Guggenheim Lab’s mission in New York: confronting comfort. Yoga mats will be provided.

The urban landscape produces feelings of anxiety, fear, pleasure, and excitement. Join Kaja Kühl, founder and principal of youarethecity, as she brings together psychologists and urban design experts to create devices that alter our urban sensory experience. How do scent, sound, taste, sight, and touch influence our feelings of comfort or discomfort in public space? Can design improve happiness? Participants will create wearable objects that alter and enhance their experience of the sites surrounding the Lab.

Danish architect and enfant terrible Bjarke Ingels inspired many with his 2009 manifesto-in-comic-book-form Yes Is More, in which he questioned predecessors and contemporaries for architectural escapades he felt had become naively utopian or scarily pragmatic. His firm BIG searches for a pragmatic utopian architecture that surprises on social, economic, and environmental levels. Do you wonder whether sustainability can be understood not as a series of sacrifices, but as an exercise in pure pleasure-seeking? Join Ingels for a visual tour of hedonistic sustainability.

Above: Showing how cities around the world are taking back their streets for pedestrians, cyclists, and transit riders.

Streetfilms produces short films that show how smarter transportation design and policy can create better places to live and work. The nearly 400 videos made by Streetfilms have been viewed more than four million times online and have inspired action and behavioral change worldwide. But they do not bring about change alone. Join us for a night of Streetfilms, followed by a discussion with Elizabeth Press, Streetfilms producer; Caroline Samponaro, director of bicycle advocacy at Transportation Alternatives; and Mike Lydon, principal of the Street Plans Collaborative. The discussion will focus on how these groups are working together to make New York City a safer, more sustainable, and healthier place to live.